Fellows in Residence

Dance

jaamil olawale kosoko

Choreographer, Author, and Performance Artist — United States

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American choreographer, author, performance artist, and curator. jaamil’s interdisciplinary practice merges performance, video, sculpture, and poetry, exploring queer Black theory, emergence, and critical rest-care strategies. jaamil’s works — including The (chrysalis) Archives, Black Body Amnesia, Chameleon, Séancers, and Bessie Award-nominated #negrophobia — have toured to venues including EMPAC, Fusebox Festival, The Guggenheim Museum, ICA at VCU, Montréal Arts Interculturels, Museum of Arts and Design, New York Live Arts, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others.

Shrouded//the End of Dances is an immersive performance installation and living sculpture that invites audiences to engage physically by moving through the space and mirroring the actions of the three metamorphosing performers onstage. In this work, the corporeal and the ephemeral coalesce as bodies draped in rich brown silks form a shifting veil, concealing and revealing complex new modes of witnessing the living archive of the body. Scattered across the space, these sculptures act as conduits for hidden bodily truths, prompting viewers to reflect on how their own physical forms archive emotions, memories, and the intricacies of human existence. Through choreography, materiality, and audience participation, the work expands traditional notions of time, presence, performance, and embodied storytelling.

Film/Video

Eva Weber

Filmmaker — Germany/United Kingdom

Eva Weber is an acclaimed filmmaker known for MERKEL (“A revealing portrait” – IndieWire), THE SOLITARY LIFE OF CRANES (“One of the most absorbing documentaries of the year” – Observer), and BLACK OUT (“Eye-opening” – Hollywood Reporter). Her fiction short FIELD STUDY was nominated for a European Film Award. A recipient of the Sundance Global Filmmaking Award and Sundance Lab Fellow, her award-winning work has screened at 100+ festivals, including Sundance, Telluride, SXSW, and IDFA.

GHOST WIVES tells the true story of Song Tiantang, a 53-year-old man who murdered six women to sell their bodies for ghost weddings —a traditional Chinese ritual of marrying the dead. Though banned under Mao, these ceremonies have resurged in rural areas like Shanxi, where mining deaths have fueled a black market for ghost brides. At its core, GHOST WIVES is a haunting reflection on the commodification of women and the forgotten lives at the margins of modern China.

Humanities Scholarship

Brian Hatcher

(History) — Professor of Theology, Tufts University — United States

Brian A. Hatcher, Packard Professor of Theology, Tufts University, is a scholar of religion and colonialism in South Asia whose monographs include Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (1999), Bourgeois Hinduism (2008), and Hinduism Before Reform (2020). He has also translated Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar’s Hindu Widow Marriage (2011) and Against High-Caste Polygamy (2023). He is currently researching the failure of colonial-era reformers to confront the problem of caste injustice in Bengal.

For his latest book project, Losing Caste, Brian asks how it is that India’s most celebrated agents of progressive change could be aware of caste as a social problem and yet lose sight of the issue when it came to their own reformist projects. Focusing on 19th and early 20th century Bengal, Brian seeks to offer an alternative history of the long nineteenth century, revealing how emancipatory theological and social initiatives remained bound by, or blind to, the strictures and exclusions of caste society.

Upcoming Fellows

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Dance

Eva Chou

Professor in the Department of English, CUNY Baruch College — United States

Eva Chou has written on the great eighth-century poet Tu Fu (Cambridge University Press) and the seminal twentieth-century writer Lu Xun (Association for Asian Studies Publications). Now researching ballet in China, she has published many articles on the subject and frequently reviews dance performances. Her work has been supported by the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, Library of Congress, Japan Foundation, H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, NEH, ACLS, and Radcliffe Institute; she has held visiting positions at University of Cambridge and Charles University, Prague.

While in residence Eva will be working on a history of the project to create Chinese ballets, a project that developed in parallel to, and sometimes in rivalry with, the classical ballet repertory received from Soviet advisors. Its most long-lived works are "Our Red Army Girls" and "White-Haired Girl" from the 1960s while recent notable works were premiered in 2022 for the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary. Their development is used to show how creative works negotiated the state’s cultural policies; their dance analyses reveal the compromises and solutions that, taken together, make for a complex record that will be continuing.

Dance

Kristopher Estes-Brown

Choreographer, Composer, and Theater Director — United States

Kristopher Estes-Brown is an American multidisciplinary artist who has worked as a choreographer, composer, and theater director. His choreography has been described as athletic and expressive with unique musicality, and eye-catching theatricality. Estes-Brown has created over 90 contemporary dance works as well as 8 full-length ballets. Estes-Brown’s music melds a big cinematic sound with dance theater sensibilities. His music has been featured in dance, theater, short films and digital media.

While in residency at Bogliasco, Kristopher Estes-Brown will be choreographing and composing When It Leaves. This work explores early life traumas and their physical manifestations throughout different stages of development. In 2026, When It Leaves will be produced into a dance theater production.

Film/Video

Henry Hills

Experimental Filmmaker — United States

HENRY HILLS has been making short, intensely rhythmic experimental films since 1975. A longtime resident of New York's East Village, he has maintained working relationships with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, composer John Zorn, & choreographer Sally Silvers. From 2005-2018 he was Professor at FAMU, the Czech national film academy in Prague, and he currently lives in Vienna. He received a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship & has films in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art.

Hills will be both editing & shooting material for a short film using water imagery. While the frame will be filled with lovely abstract patterns, the focus of the progression will be on the periphery (eg., water from the Vaporetto in Venice with wooden foundation beams and reflections of the palazzos hovering in the corners, or from the East River water taxis with the Wall Street skyline creeping into the background). The film is about the transitory nature of earthly joy. Hills wants to be optimistic.